Pro Tools over a local network.

Greetings. My first post. I produce for Bill Young Productions Houston. We're a Pro Tools (Win 2K) house with 6 systems and 3 LE systems. We back up on a central network for archive. Our tracks are built in PT, our voice work is done on 1/2" 4-track. Tape is getting tougher to find, and we need a solution for voicing in Pro Tools, with great speed. We literally do thousands of radio and TV spots a year, and need something that will be fast, dependable and can store a lot of audio, and can be transferred from room to room at a moments notice - comparable in speed to someone bringing me an order, laying a 4-track tape on my desk and I voice it, mix it and get it to our shipping department in 10 minutes or less. Any suggestions are appreciated.

As a heavy duty pro tools user, I am not sure why you aren't using Pro Tools already to do this rather than tape.

100baseT networking is probably faster than loading up a tape. It sounds like you already have a central file store. Many post production houses use work on centrally stored files shared between multiple users.

Have yo tried this? If so are there specific obstacles you have run into impeding your work flow?

The main reason has been of the ease of voicing to tape, not to mention it's more forgiving on input. During our busiest concert seasons, speed is crucial. But you're right, we've should have already made the switch. We've just completed the installation of 6 DM2000 Yamaha consoles - so we've made a turn to that direction. Do you know if fiber optic networking would be an advantage?

Fiber San could be an advantage but many of your spots will be very short (I imagine) and normal 100BaseT is very fast for short low track count stuff.

Using a new feature in Pro Tools V6 called the "Workspace" window, you can open a template session, find your file in the Workspace window (it works like a finder window), you can even audition the audio in the workspace window with pro tools open and running.

Once you locate the file just drag it right onto the track in your session. Hit record and get the VO done. If you use a pre-defined session template you could be openning, importing and recording in less than 5 minutes. And I have to think that 24 bit A/D recording is as forgiving as any recording medium.

I do a lot of work with Mercy Songs where we prerecord 100's of short scripture readings and several musical passages. Then we assemble them into composite works such as the Rosary. Etc. Using the Workspace feature of Pro Tools seems like it would be a very powerful tool for you.

Thanks for the replies so far. Sound like great suggestions. Sdevino & Gerax, I'll do some investigation into what you talked about, and PT Version 6. We do literally hundreds of :30 & :60 second commercials in a week.